Thing You’re Cobbling Together

That feeling when you come home from an unusually tough Monday, but realise that tomorrow is a holiday, Deepavali, a day you feel guilty for not knowing enough about after living in Malaysia and Singapore for over a decade. Not even a wikipedia scan, but you know it has something to do with light and joy- and really how many holidays can one person keep track of. Maybe Shruti will give you the basics in the comments of this Facebook poem thing you’re cobbling together.

Your biggest choice at the onset of the evening was wine or egg nog. You start with some Pinot with dinner, knowing that the egg nog will be best later in the night when you’re eating dessert, which on this celebratory night, might be donuts or ice cream, and if the egg nog has kicked in by that point it will be both. This is the fattest you have ever been, but since you spent most of your life bone rail thin, you pretend that your second chin and protruding gut are signs of being a distinguished gentleman, rather than a chubby slob.

You’re gonna go for a walk/jog tomorrow morning, just to get back out there and listen to a few podcasts. Enough is enough and you need to get back to productive mode. Middle age creeps up on you like a sloven shadow. You’ve forgotten if you’re attractive or not, or if you still even care. You must care, because you spend 26 dollars on fancy hair pomade and you now own a beard trimmer.

But no shame or guilt or insecure narcissism tonight. It’s Deepavali Eve and your choices are limited but favourable. Maybe play a game of John Madden Football, or listen to Ben Harper and see if you can’t squeeze out that poem about teaching poetry you have been carrying around for two weeks.

Earlier in the night you listened to Abba and Megan Trainor whilst making cookie dough with your nine year old daughter. You hope that when she is older, she might sometimes say things like, “I remember listening to Abba and Megan Trainor while making cookie dough with my dad.” You remember making a kite with your dad, and spending so many hours in the darkroom, watching the world reveal its self through developer and fixers and stop baths.

You might pick up the guitar and curate those few chords and marvel at how they might become a song, if you only had more time and focus and talent and whatever else people who write songs need.

This was not meant to be a self-bashing exercise.

There is wine, egg nog, donuts, ice cream freedom, and an endless night without a wake up call. Now where did you put that poem?

Holiday and Rebel Music

Listening to early Brice Springsteen and enjoying a beer. Friends are off to all corners of the earth and we are here, again, but looking forward to healing, resting reading, writing, watching, eating and just getting back to normal after that blitzkrieg we called November.

Although, I frown on violence, there is something very satisfying about reading the story about how Chad Smith’s wife (drummer from RHCP) attacked Scott Baio while yelling Grab’em by the pussy.

Last day of school was mellow and uneventful. I don’t have much to say tonight. I am feeling better. Good. Great. Gonna listen to some tunes, watch some shows, read and call it a night. I don’t have to wake up at any time tomorrow and we have nothing planned, but maybe a few hours by the pool.

Last night’s play list by the way made me feel pretty great. Forgot to share:

• Patti Smith- Because The Night
• Pearl Jam- Gimme Some Truth
• NOFX- You’re Wrong, Don’t Call Me White, Franco Un-American
• Dead Prez- Police State
• Public Enemy- Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos….

I got a letter from the government
The other day
I opened and read it
It said they were suckers
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me given' a damn - I said never!

Baby Tooth

Not much to share today. Still reeling a bit from my day in the sun yesterday.


Took the kids to the dentist first thing. Dropped $100 on a filling in a tiny cavity on a baby tooth that felt unnecessary.


Then it was Skye and I on our own. She biked, I skated to the playground at East Coast Park. Ice Cream. Sweat. She made a friend. We enjoyed the breezes.


Then home for a stint. Shower and off to Myria’s for dinner with Lee and Cindy and then a great Kiwi film called Hunt For The Wildepeople with Steve and Katy at Keri Lee and Mile’s place. I love having non-American friends. Always fun to get insights and give insights into other cultures.


Now home. Passed midnight and it is hitting me that we start back at work in two days. The final weekend is here. This has been a perfect and necessary break, but time to roll up the sleeves and get back into school mode. That means some marking and planning to do in the next forty eight hours.


I should probably start running again too, if I want to have any chance at even walking this half marathon I have signed up for.

Day You Dream

Today was the kind of day you dream about when you are knee deep in school stress, backed up emails, meetings you have to attend and/or plan, and that feeling of being overburdened and overworked. Nothing happened and it sort of faded in and out like the forming of a cloud or an impractical idea.


Woke up late and casually got ready to go to the doctor to get my lab results, remember the liter of pee? Happy to announce that my protein levels are lower than they have been in three years and are at almost normal levels. I like to think that this vast improvement has something to do with the fact that I started drinking again this year, but I am not a doctor so what do I know.


After the doctor, I met Mairin and the girls for a coffee and we headed home. Shortly there after, Aloni and her new baby (Morgan) came over for a visit and Claire and her family joined us by the pool. We had some snacks, a bit of wine and the slow grey day dripped and dropped on us a bit while we caught up, enjoyed the water and each others’ company. None of us had anywhere to be or anything to do.


They left around four thirty at which point I picked up and ate enough veggie sushi to make me feel slightly ill, but fully satiated. On the way to the mall to pick up dinner, I blasted Dead Prez, complete with white dude fist pumping, and on the way back some Positively 4th Street and Like A Rolling Stone Dylan.


The kids are finally asleep and the only thing left to do is to crawl into bed and watch as many episodes of Transparent as we can before Mairin falls asleep, and then read a few more pages of Amy Schumer’s book, which is great by the way. Claire asked me how it was and all I could say was, “Makes me realize how hard it is to be a woman.”


This two week break in October is so essential to our lives at UWCSEA. I feel refreshed and relaxed and ready to be back at work, having said that I am going to enjoy this last week. Sure, I have some work to do, yes I also need to get to my classroom to water my plants, but I have a date at the water park tomorrow, we are seeing Sausage Party tomorrow night with friends, and there might be a round of golf planned for Thursday.


All in all, life is pretty good at the moment.

Privilege and Jet Skis

The way the Air Asia flights work out, you have to spend a night in Langkawi when you got to Koh Lipe. Something about the connecting ferry and flights don’t match up. No big whoop, so you spend one night in Malaysia.


Last time we came here we chose proximity to the airport as our chief criteria and paid for it dearly with a Shining like experience at a vast, unmanned, prison-like-hotel that claimed to be a Four Points Sheraton, but was really an empty compound with terrible food and the largest square pool we had ever seen. For the money we paid it was not good, so this time we changed our primary criteria, paid a bit more and went with the place that had the best pool.


Much better experience. We arrived, checked in and were by said pool by 3pm, reading books and listening to the kids squeal in delight as they made their way down the slide for the gajillionth time. The food here is meh, but the rooms are nice, the pool is sweet and the beach is close by. After a few hours, I went for a walk down the beach to explore.


I didn’t walk down the beach to explore, really I wanted to price the jet skis.


You see as a kid, my family didn’t travel much. We never went on vacations. Sure we took a few camping trips up north, but I can’t remember any times we stayed in a hotel as a family, and to this day I have never been on an airplane with either of my parents. So while my Marin county peers spoke of trips to Tahoe, or Hawaii or Cabo, my family considered a long Sunday at Stinson beach or maybe a few nights at Lake Berryessa- whereever the hell that is, a vacation.


But one thing I do remember from these lake trips were the Jet Skis. Sure they were terrorising the calm beauty of the lake with all their fossil fuel glory, but god damn it if I didn’t want to be the one to be doing the terrorising. I remembering wishing that somehow, one time, we would just walk over to the guy who was renting them, pay him and reek havoc on the surface of that lake. But that never happened. Not even once.


Too Expensive. Too dangerous. Too loud. Too too.


Why don’t you have another feta cheese, cucumber and tomato sandwich and ride on this inflatable raft instead? But don’t go too far. Maybe stay where you can reach the bottom and where we can see you.


Someday- I promised myself, I would be the kind of guy who would walk up to the jet ski guy and say, “I want this machine for the next hour, so gas her up and get out of my way.” At which point I would obviously be buffed and tanned enough to commandeer the thing like some kind of swimsuit model. I would be wet and with chiseled jaw and sculpted abs ride the jet ski around the lake where women and girls of all shapes and sizes would marvel at my sheer mastery of jet ski moves. I might do a flip if I caught the right wave.


I had no notions of grandeur or hyper-masculinity on my mind today, I just thought that if it was somehow affordable, thirty minutes of taking the girls for a spin would be a nice way to end the day and our trip. I would not only be the dad who says yes to jet skis, hell I would be the dad who suggested jet skis!


$54 for 30 minutes.
Fifty Four Dollars for thirty minutes.


Are you freaking kidding me? In Malaysia of all places. $54 for 30 mins. I am no math whiz, but that is $1.80 a minute. It just didn’t seem possible. I immediately started making excuses:


Too expensive. Not worth it. Not sustainable. Wastes fuel. They are so loud and obnoxious anyway. Maybe we are not and never will be Jet Ski people. The girls need to learn that some things are just out of our range. We just spent five days in Thailand and spent a petty penny on Scuba Diving, would adding a thirty minute thrill ride on a water motorcycle really be added value?


This was not going to happen. I was leaving the beach.


I looked over my shoulder one last time and watched a guy doing jumps off the waves on the choppy water as the sun was low in the sky and cracking diamonds in her wake. I couldn’t see his face, but if I looked hard enough I am sure I saw his wide smile, from ear to ear, because not only was he having a great time, he didn’t care how much the machine cost a minute or how much gas it was wasting; he was high on adrenaline and the freedom that comes from paying whatever the cost to have fun. I went back to the pool, grabbed my book and decided that I would wait to have a cocktail with dinner.


As a child of lower middle-class parents, who worked their asses off as small business owners in Marin county of all places, I know the value of a dollar. And maybe, just maybe in the long run, my kids would be better served realising that somethings are just off limits, not because you can’t afford them, although knowing these limits is valuable too, but knowing that some things we might could afford, but it is just wise to say no.


Having said all that, I don’t know….it is almost time for sleep and I am still dreaming of a time I ride that goddamn jet ski.

…

As I was showering for dinner and rough drafting this post about the jet ski, I also started to think about the privilege of holiday. As I mentioned before, vacationing was not a privilege my family enjoyed. We had fun. We did stuff. We were not poor, but we did not vacation. Not the way that my kids are off to Thailand and Chiang Mai and the USA and god knows where else.


“I didn’t even know resorts like this existed when I was a kid,” said Mairin as we walked around the massive pool, “much less ever dream of staying at one.”


The very notion of taking a break. A holiday. A vacation is such a statement of privilege, because it presupposes that you even have a job. A job that allows you take holidays and one that pays enough to let you do and go where you want. This is what I was thinking about as the cool water from the “rain” shower fell to the granite tiles and rolled beneath the egg shaped boutique tub.


Anyway…it is late and I am tired and we are headed home tomorrow. I am annoyed that the AC is not cold enough in our room and that the music from some bar is louder than I want it to be. I am also thinking about how I was in Kenya not too long ago and that I will be in Manilla in not too long from now.


I can’t decide if my problem is that I think too much or not enough. Or maybe my problem is that I always think that I must have any problems at all.

…

Joshua Ferris’ book To Rise Again At A Decent Hour has got me thinking and neurotic in the best way. It was a pleasure to read. It is not going to pass any bechdel tests, and the characters and plot could use some…something, but his attention to words and the mundane and the unnecessary are beautiful and captivating. You can be cynical and say that he is another uber-intellectual white dude whining about nothing ala Franzen and Eggers, and that we have heard enough of this white male privilege, and I might agree with you, but I can always take another 300 pages worth. There are some choice scenes. He spends two pages on hand lotion. What more can I say? Scott, Ari, Chris, Shasta, Jordan, curious what you all think.

His Own Little Universe

For a minute tonight, as I looked in the mirror while brushing my teeth, I realised that I have become the tanned salty slightly burned-red tattooed older gentleman with salt and pepper hair. It was a look that fit well, like a well-worn shirt you might find in a Goodwill or vintage store on the Lower-East side. His eyes were slightly blood-shot and teeth yellowed and misshapen.


The man looking back at me from the mirror looked familiar, as if I had seen him in a dream from my youth. He was tired and hot and nursing a slight cold and a sore throat, but he looked satisfied. Content. He looked like a man who was confident in his skills and his career. He had the means to be in this nice room but didn’t need more flash to be anything more than he was. He was a father and middle aged, but attuned to the young and hip enough to be relevant at least in his own little universe. He had traveled the world and on this given Saturday he was in this hotel room, just up from a nap after a few days of a much needed and a perfectly planned holiday.


He would return to his comfortable home, where he would strum the guitar he so missed when he was on holiday. He would get back into his running and get caught up on work that was already creeping in and haunting his holiday. He looked a bit like an artist, a writer perhaps, but not the kind that had been totally committed to the craft in any way beyond a hobby. Sure he was writing a book, but even he wasn’t sure of it would ever actually exist in the world. He had things to say and a tiny audience that humored him and told him that they cared, but all of that could be so fleeting and trivial.


He knew that he would survive even if the book never materialized and because of this haughty ambivalence, there was a calm doubt knit in his brow as to whether or not said book would ever be published. Regardless, he missed the characters he was creating and his bed and his home and his cat and his car and the comfort of being middle aged in a time and place when he loved the life he had been dealt and playing with a healthy competence.


He could cash in at anytime and feel he had gotten his money worth at the table.

…

The last day of a holiday is never the best. I was tired and cranky and the glimmer of the sea was replaced with stagnant water, filled with jelly fish and more trash than is okay to look at. After a long walk around the island, we discovered that we have found the perfect little nook and beach on Koh Lipe. We spent a lot of day snapping at each other, reading and overheating.


A nice dinner. A few drinks here and there and a nice quiet last night in the room- AC cranking and ready for a final night back in Langkawi tomorrow night. I am at the point in a trip when I miss my bed. We have spent the exact right amount of time here. Great holiday. Done.

…

I have about 50 pages left of To Rise Again At A Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris which I am enjoying very much, a slight head ache, and a runny nose. April is upon us and somewhere not too far away from my psyche, I am missing my students. Not too much. I have another week to unwind, but my mind is on the next eleven weeks and our trip back home to the US of A.

The Fringe Elements

During the school year, I wrote posts that would be litany of all the things I did on an average day. Thankfully, however, the holiday lists are much shorter. They really just include: woke up, ate, slept, ate and slept.


There were a few other things i did today but not much else: Started getting Kaia comfortable on a skateboard, which is ironic, seeing that I am not comfortable on a skateboard. Then we headed to Keri-Lee’s house to catch up, meet their puppy, do some swimming, have lunch and scoot back home.


Then as always is the case after four pm- I went down for my oldman nap, dinner, watched Chelsea Does Racism and now trying to stay awake and interested enough to crank out this edition of whatever the hell this thing is becoming.


In other news- I tried to explain the Super Delegate system to KL, who is from New Zealand, even bringing up the 1968 convention and the name George McGovern. She found it unbelievable and depressing, which is a great way to think about the American “democratic” system. We couldn’t bring ourselves to understand the Trump debacle.


This morning while clipping my toenails, I finally yanked off the loose nail and was pleasantly surprised by the lack of pain and the new nail already growing fitfully beneath the shell of the damaged one. Sorry Jeff, no photos. You will just have to take my word on it for now.


The most serious topic I thought about today was whether or not to shave before we go to Thailand or to commit to some kind of beard in the coming weeks. Keep the hair and beard trimmed and silver or let it go a bit wild and bushy all around. I know where Mairin stands on this one, but I am not sure. I will probably act on a whim either way, but for now I will entertain both options. The fringe elements of my mind are considering a mohawk or a bleach dye job.


I have had the hiccups twice today. It has been years since I have suffered this fate and it is not pleasant. I am not a fan of things happening in my body that I am not in control of.

…

One of these nights when I am adequately rested, I might attempt to take on a topic more interesting than my facial hair, hiccups or toenails, in the meantime this is all I got.

Booked and Confirmed

Day two of the holiday may have been even mellower than the first. Woke up around 8:30 again, the girls were playing on their own and Mairin was off to Zumba.

After making a quick breakfast for the girls, we just hung out in our pajamas for most of the morning. I strummed my guitar until Kaia came over and we worked on two songs- Under The Bridge by RHCP and Waiting On An Angel by Ben Harper. She then grabbed her guitar and practiced a few songs she wants to learn.

Skye was busy playing her keyboard and taking care of her baby dolls.

Showers. Lunch with Shruti and Sam. Dropped Sam off at the airport and home for a nap of the dead. Mairin actually said, ":What the hell is wrong with you that you are so tired? It's not like you did anything today but eat." I think my body is just catching up on rest.

Picked up some Veganburg and we watched the first Snow White and The Huntsman movie in the dark and snuggled on the couch. My dad called and talked to the girls, which was great because they haven’t talked in a long time.

He sounded good, but was surprised by my white hair until I reminded him that I was old now at 42- it is inevitable.

We are so excited about this summer. The rooms are booked. The houses confirmed. Happy Cow is finding every vegan restaurant up and down Cascadia- we are exploring hikes, rafting and horseback riding trips in the great outdoors.

Sorry if these first few holiday posts are a bit dull or mundane. My brain and body are slowly unwinding and to be honest even while I am awake and driving my mind is on auto pilot and not rustling about too hard.

The little bird landing on the podium at the Bernie Sanders’ rally was kind of cute and well….let’s stop there.

Slow and Easy

Day one of the holiday started off slow and easy. Woke up to a quiet house around 8:30 and stayed in bed till about 9:00. After a bit of tough negotiations with Skye (She threw a tantrum and I hurled vague threats of “losing stuff.”) we scooted to Starbucks for a light breakfast and drinks.

Back home for a quick shower, then lunch at Alt and a movie. Skye and Mairin saw Kung Fu Panda III, and like a cool dad (or read an irresponsible one) I took Kaia to see the delightfully not too dark or slightly too violent Batman vs Superman- to which she said, “That was amazing.”

After a brief explanation about the difference between the Marvel and DC universes, and a trip down memory lane in which I described my Saturday mornings watching The Justice League, we both agreed that the music when Wonder Woman showed up was the coolest ever, and we agreed to see her full length film as soon as it comes out.

What can I say? The girl likes her movies and she is adequately desensitized to violence to enjoy more and more of them with me. The Huntsman series and Lord of the Rings are on tap and I am not sure which one of us is more excited. It’s not like we are showing her Beverly Hills Cop yet, right Geoff?

After the movie we came home, but I had to go to school to print up all our hotel vouchers. Once I got back, I took a nap. We had some dinner and I have been watching John Oliver and Samantha Bee videos on youtube. Next up, a bottle of champagne with Mairin, some episodes of Blackish, New Girl and maybe try out the new Chelsea Handler Does show everyone is talking about.

I’ll probably read a bit and go to sleep later than I should, because…..holiday.

That’s only day one and we aren’t even in Thailand yet.